Two Approaches To The Absurdity Of Life Literature Reviews Example

The existentialist view of life is that it poses a question that is impossible to answer. While in prior centuries, religion provided the predominant framework through which people were expected to view their lives, the existentialist perspective sees life as an experience foisted upon humanity by an anonymous entity, without any significance but with plenty of suffering. The chaos present in the world leaves each individual with the task of imposing meaning and order on it. The attempts that we make to create that structure are fabricated and only serve to provide a brief distraction from the hopelessness of trying to understand how life works. The fact that both Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Eugene O’Neill’s A Long Day’s Journey into Night deconstruct the traditional plot line (exposition, complication, crisis, climax and resolution) shows that both playwrights are expressing their views about the illusory nature of any sort of structure.
According to Waiting for Godot, a person’s life depends expressly on chance. This makes time and existence meaningless as well. Realizing this impels people to seek outside agencies, real or fictitious, to provide them with a sense of structure. When Vladimir talks about the parable of the two thieves from the Bible, he sardonically mentions that since one thief was saved, that represents a decent chance of reaching paradise. The fact that Beckett uses the word “percentage” to describe this calculation is significant because it shows how human fates are determined. The entire process, in the existentialist view, is random, which means that it all boils down to percentages. Salvation and condemnation, the twin lodestones driving the evangelical experience, are spaces on a giant wheel that spins and stops at whim to determine individual outcomes. Vladimir notes that the story of the two thieves only appears in one of the four Gospels; even this is random. Indeed, one of the other Gospels indicates that both thieves received condemnation, reducing the lottery to 25 percent. So if even the Bible indicates a degree of the random in existence, then Beckett’s implication is that there can be no reliable structure at all in the world.
The very structure of the Waiting for Godot reflects this chaos as well. A typical play contains a plot line that moves from resolution up to a climax before settling back down to a resolution. In this play, there is no discernible plot line. A tree in the play has no leaves one day but is covered with them on the next day, perhaps a nod to Jesus’ curse of a fig tree, which is one of the more random acts that he commits during his ministry, but then again, maybe not. The pair of tramps returns to the same exact spot each day, waiting for Godot to show up. The day before no longer exists in the tramps’ memory. Night falls with the swiftness of Poe’s pendulum, but Godot never shows up. There is no motion toward a climax or toward any sort of resolution. The entire setting and structure of the play are designed to show that even time itself is set up on the principles of chance. As a result, life has a similarly fungible basis.
If time itself has no meaning, then a repetition of the same cycles all the way to infinity as just as logical a chronology for a story as any other. And so this is the chronology that Beckett chooses. Estragon and Vladimir keep coming back every day and go through the same basic series of events. The difference between this and a story such as A Long Day’s Journey into Night is that the story here does not reflect what day, month or even year it is. There is no sense of how long the two have been coming to the same spot, but the assumption is that they will keep coming back, day after day. The whole idea of tense (past, future, present) goes out the window, because there is no expectation of things to come and no remembrance of things past. Time has essentially collapsed. Indeed, Vladimir and Estragon argue whether the messenger promised Saturday or Sunday for an arrival, and they can’t even tell the current day (1.135-140).
Consider the encounters that Vladimir and Estragon have every time Pozzo and Lucky happen by. The first time, Pozzo is healthy, and he is heading to the city market to sell his slave, Lucky, who has become irritating. However, the second time, Pozzo is blind, and Lucky is mute. Pozzo does not remember the first meeting and insists that Lucky has always been mute. The meaningless of any progression of time for Pozzo and Lucky reflects the general insignificance of time for all four of them. Pozzo tries to guess Vladimir’s age at “Sixty? Seventy?” but Estragon rejoins that his guess for Vladimir’s age is “eleven” (1.390-391). Even when Lucky can talk, his speech is incomprehensible, providing an additional layer to the chaos. Pozzo and Lucky’s daily forays through the play highlight the absurd nature of time. This is also expressed through Pozzo’s fruitless search for his watch, which ends up with him asking Vladimir and Estragon listening to his stomach and hearing his heart, rather than the watch (1.660-664).
Even so, Estragon and Vladimir try to distract themselves from the absurdity of their situation by taking part in inane activities. They come across as humorous in their arguments about everyday topics, talking to Pozzo and Lucky about similarly soporific subjects, sleeping, and even thinking about killing themselves. These distractions all are ways they try to take their attention off the fact that the keep returning to seek the return of a shadowy figure who may be completely but at least is partially of their own creation. Unfortunately, this figure (Godot) is never going to come. While Vladimir represents optimism and Estragon stands for despair, neither one ultimately wants to acknowledge this, as that would mean that they would be branding their own lives as a meaningless failure. This is a symbol for the petty ways that people try to point their own attention away from their situations. The two tramps think, at least on some level, that Godot will show up and take all of their concerns away. This is a wishful thought process, but it may be all that they have to anticipate in life. Without anything to anticipate, life becomes an inexorable march to the grave. The two do consider this but do not have what it takes to finish that job either. Without the choice of death, then, they have to continue in their deluded existence.
What makes the play slightly more enigmatic is the messenger boy, who shows up at the close of every day to tell Vladimir and Estragon that Godot is not going to come that day, but that he will definitely come the next day. The fact that Vladimir eventually can predict everything that the messenger boy will say is an even more certain sign of the cyclical nature of the lives and the inevitability of a meaningless outcome. The cost of “going on” for the human race, though, is a commitment to maintaining the series of distractions.
In A Long Day’s Journey into Night, the notion that life is a repeated cycle of the same sorts of inanities is also in play, although the author does not pluck the characters out of reality and chronology to the same degree that Beckett does in Waiting for Godot. The play occurs over one day in August, 1912. Over the course of that day, the Tyrone family receives two tragic pieces of news: first, despite a lengthy treatment for morphine addiction in a sanatorium, Mary is still addicted; second, that Edmund has tuberculosis, a disorder in which the sufferer gradually coughs up his lungs, one piece at a time. As these discoveries emerge, though, the family goes through a whole series of arguments. If Mary’s husband had been willing to send her to a good doctor when she was having difficulties with the pains that childbirth continued to cause her, she might not have become addicted to morphine. Either way, though, Mary clings to the pains of her past with white knuckles while refusing to admit her continuing addiction or this fatal illness that has struck her youngest son. The fact that Edmund and Jamie never became the sort of successes that their father imagined they would is a topic of argument for all four of them. The men keep drinking and drinking throughout the play, which makes them almost comatose by the time the fourth act comes to a close.
The plot of the play tends to repeat itself over and over throughout the four acts. The arguments keep cycling around and starting over again. All of the acts take place in the living room, and all of the scenes but one take place immediately before or after eating. Each act has a different focus, taking a look at interaction between two specific characters. However, one imagines that this “long day’s journey into night” takes place day after day after day after day. One central difference, though, is that the language in O’Neill’s play expresses growth in the characters. In Beckett’s play, the language itself unravels, particularly in Lucky’s speech but also in the meaninglessness of the messenger boy’s daily missives.

Works Cited

Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot. http://samuel- beckett.net/Waiting_for_Godot_Part1.html
O’Neill, Eugene. A Long Day’s Journey into Night. New York: Yale University Press, c2002.